Campaign '04: What Becomes A President Most?

Two nights, no sleep, sipping bottled water, John Kerry sits in his flying war room, a 737, cruising from frigid Iowa to frosty New Hampshire, in a state of sublime shock. He had known that for him to rise, Howard Dean would have to fall, and even that might not be enough to win. He had already fired his campaign manager, retooled his stump speech and endured months of derision from party professionals for his dead-on-arrival campaign. He had ignored every piece of conventional strategy, decamped from his home field of New Hampshire, thrown everything at Iowa and held on tight. When the first results were coming in, he did not believe them. Early Iowa exit polls suggested a Kerry win; later ones, a blowout. "We were pinching ourselves," says an aide.

Now it's 4 in the morning, and his staff is trying to figure out how to ride the wave, where to go after New Hampshire, what to spend, how to spin. Kerry finally leans back, stretches out and closes his eyes. He wakes when the plane bounces down on the tarmac, the sun rising over Manchester; he's still a little too groggy for a 7 a.m. airport-welcome event in a chilly hangar. He turns to an aide, Stephanie Cutter, and asks how many people are out there waiting for him. "It's a very cold weekday morning," she replies, to a candidate who is used to having as many staff members at an event as voters. "About 1,000."

She is exaggerating, but the hundreds there are on fire, chanting "J.K. all the way" to Springsteen and U2 music. Kerry lets it all sink in. "I guess we really did win last night."

And as a result, everyone else had to recalculate. Howard Dean found himself clawing his way back from his near-death experience, pulling his ads from other states in order to spend all his money and manpower in New Hampshire, throwing nearly $850,000 worth of ads on the air and even handing out to undecided voters 50,000 copies of his warm and fuzzy Howard-and-Judy interview with Diane Sawyer. John Edwards' team was holding on tight, hoping to scoot past Wesley Clark and at least narrow the race a little more by the time it heads south. A new story line was taking hold: the election was all about electability; once again voters had flirted with the insurgent and then kicked him down the stairs, so they could snuggle up with the safe, steady guy the party matchmakers had offered up in the first place. It happened with Mondale and Hart, Buchanan and Dole, McCain and Bush. Kerry fans were on the streets with signs saying DATED DEAN, MARRIED KERRY. "They switched from grievance to governance," explains Dick Gephardt's pollster Ed Reilly. "They switched from who was the loudest voice to who can lead. Kerry fits that picture well, and that's why they went with him." The question for every campaign is, will they stick, or are voters still shopping around--and if so, is anyone else on their list?